Review: In Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s memories offer little comfort

On the surface, Joan Didion’s Blue Nights is a memoir about her daughter’s death.

But in contemplating the life of Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, Didion travels a more harrowing path than simply charting her grief. At times the book has the feel of a fractured emotional travelogue, as Didion empties an overstuffed suitcase of the unspoken. Thoughts and admissions — or, as Didion puts it, “rosaries of neglects, derelictions, and delinquencies” — about love and commitment and parenthood that are often suppressed in mixed company are pecked at until all that remains of the carcass is an eye-to-eye socket look at the End.

With The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion’s 2005 account of the year following the death of husband John Gregory Dunne from a heart attack, Didion wrote more directly about loss and grief. Rather than cycle through those subjects again, she uses them to contemplate “this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, death.”

Despite a certain serenity in its title, Blue Nights is at times an uncomfortable read, in part for the direct way Didion dissects some of our dishonesty about joy and life. There are flashes of Didion’s life here that aren’t particularly relatable. The traveling existence of a two writer family comes across as lofty — with the visits to film sets and a checklist of hotels the family frequented. Bypass that existence, though, and the anxieties and phobias surrounding parenthood are taut and tooth-rattling when presented in Didion’s blunt and compact sentences. Her approach is more eloquent and less crass than the comedian Louis CK, but the effect is the same: Debunking the soft-lit myth of parenthood as a noble pursuit and fessing to its myriad insecurities.

This has a soul-stirring effect, especially when Didion declares, “When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.”

Blue Nights opens with an elegant explanation of the phrase that gives the book its title, describing a period in April and May in New York when twilight takes on a certain beauty. There’s a whisper of romance and a sense of wonder in her description — and then a bracing turn: “This book is called Blue Nights because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.”

And so the book begins proper with a date: “July 26 2010.” It’s summer. It also would have been Quintana Roo’s seventh wedding anniversary. There will be moments of wistful spring, but Blue Nights, as promised, is more often autumnal and wintery.

Some of Didion’s early musings in the book, seemingly established as detail-oriented flourishes, carry great weight later. She ponders her daughter’s choice of stephanotis to be worn in her braid on her wedding day. “Was that another sentimental choice?” Didion asks. “Did she remember the stephanotis?”

Didion remembers it specifically outside a home they lived in from 1978 to 1988. A termite exterminator insisted on tenting and fogging the house with vikane and chloropicrin, which had the side effect of ridding the property of its stephanotis and mint. Here, Didion takes a first dig, not at medicine directly, but at the trust we put in progress, the idea that things can be made better without some tangential damage or cost. Soon she states it more clearly: “Medicine, I have had reason since to notice more than once, remains an imperfect art.”

The subsequent direction of Blue Nights is far from linear, with Didion circling themes. A segment about Quintana Roo’s adoption and name is rich with sentimental detail and telling metaphor. Didion’s daughter is presented as thistly, lovable, precocious, creative and brilliantly complex. Didion also describes her daughter’s “depths and shallows, her quicksilver changes,” which grew to take on clinical names. Didion admits to missing or dismissing signs of these changes. Similarly Didion, 76, misses signals in her own life as she begins to age.

She thinks back to 2003 and how well she and Dunne seemed to be doing when in actuality their sturdy appearance was a veneer. First his death, then her daughter’s. There are deaths of friends and acquaintances and children in the news, and then various afflictions expose a frailty Didion never before felt. The notion of abandonment moves to the fore. Memories, she’s told, are forever, yet she finds them to be a cold comfort.

In Magical Thinking, Didion’s grief ran concurrently with the task of caring for Quintana, whose health took a terrible turn. There is no such balance in Blue Nights, which settles into a twitchy solitude. It’s a frank and unflinching book that offers little warmth as the blue nights pass and winter approaches.